Thursday, March 6, 2008

Selenium User Meetup videos

Meeting up at Google for the user evening was great fun.  It was short notice, but we managed to fill the 100 slots on the attendee list, and get two pieces where video recorded, while still leaving time for mingling. 

The first video was the lightening talks by the developers and some friends. Its up on YouTube.  Its 92 minutes long.  Dan Fabulich (ex of Bea, now Redfin) if he is not a star already, should be as his segment How not to run a Successful open source project is a very entertaining few minutes. Fast forward to 51 mins to see Fabulich by name, Fabulous by nature.
ThoughtWorks was represented by me (Paul Hammant) and Philippe Hanrigou.  My piece was on release roadmap (19 mins, 20 secs in), Philippe's was on Selenium-Grid (23 mins in). His featured a very impressive movie showing Selenium-Grid running dozens of windows on Philippe's MacBook.  Jennifer Bevan of Google also talked of their farm and use of Selenium for QA of some of the web applications, and the problems/successes of scaling (28 mins, 40 secs in).  The other segments were great too. Thanks to all the friends of ThoughtWorks who did a segment, and have helped make Selenium the success it is.

The second piece was a Q&A session (which we kinda had to cut short, because the lightening talks speakers were not following the suggested 5 minute limit :).  That was just the selenium developers (minus Nelson Sproul of Bea who could not make it).  See the video (18 mins)

We were at Google for two days in all. On Sunday 24th the developers met up and talked/coded through the day. On the Monday it was a regular work day for Google, so we were able to see the campus a bit more busy than the Sunday.  Planning the release of 1.0, and the assimilation of Simon Stewart's WebDriver into a 2.0 code-line was key.  Selenium users will be pleased to know that we talked about the two pending Flash/Flex enablers for Selenium that might get merged in shortly.  We sadly ran out of time, and could not speak about or merge in an Erlang driver for Selenium (coded in a matter of days by Brian O'Rourke before the meetup).